With the development of network and multimedia technology, the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is accepted by more and more users because of advantages thereof such as convenience, intelligence and controllability. Larger pressure and increasing abnormalities of the system brought by the increasing of users becomes a problem that the IPTV system has to face and solve. The Electronic Programmer Guide (EPG) is an important component of the IPTV system, to provide an operational interface to the user, and the user may obtain preferred channel or program and so on by the EPG. If an exception occurs to the EPG server, the IPTV system cannot provide service for the user normally.
In a Content Delivery Network (CDN) where the IPTV system operates practically, the networking structure of the network generally comprise multiple layers of CDN nodes. The CDN nodes are layered in the CDN network system, wherein, CND nodes in the first layer are usually center nodes, and a primary EPG server generally belongs to center nodes. Each CDN node comprises a respective EPG server, a service proxy (CDN Agent) and a Streaming media Server (SS), the EPG server displays information such as channel, program to a terminal user. The EPG server stores the content number corresponding to each media content file and the channel number corresponding to each channel. The CDN Manager of the content delivery system is responsible for managing all of the CDN nodes.
In the existing system, if an exception occurs in an EPG server of a certain node, the users to this node may be scheduled to another node to accept the service; or some EPG servers may be added to the center nodes as cold backup servers, and when an EPG server fails, the service in the failed EPG server is switched to a cold backup server, which continues to provide the service.
The following problems exist during the process of dealing with the above-mentioned EPG server fault.
If the users to the failed EPG server are transferred to another EPG server, the load on the another EPG server will be increased, so that the quality of service provided by the another EPG server is influenced; if a cold backup EPG server is used, the cold backup EPG service needs to be online to be the EPG server of this node by manual configuration when a fault occurs in an EPG server in a certain node, during this process, it is required that a network manager warns in time and the engineering staff configures the switch manually, which needs to consume a long time and thus influencing the quality of service.